Quebec, Canada: Cirque du Soleil founder's train to the slopes

It is refreshing to come across someone who has made a fortune and uses it to do something imaginative that gives pleasure to others. But perhaps one would expect that of Daniel Gauthier, who broke the mould of circuses with Cirque du Soleil. A native of Quebec, Gauthier is devoting the same creative panache and $300 million to his vision for a three-part tourist development that should come into its own this winter.

The mountain of Le Massif in Charlevoix has been a favourite of skiers and snowboarders for years, but a new train linking Quebec with the slopes and a new hotel, La Ferme at Baie-Saint-Paul, are intended to make the area a year-round destination. Baie-Saint-Paul is the gateway to the Charlevoix, a region celebrated for its concentration of artisan food producers and creative people drawn by its natural beauty – as early as the 1920s one of Canada’s Group of Seven was painting there.

To take visitors to his home region by the most sustainable means of powered land transport, Gauthier has not only created a new train but bought the spectacular track on which it runs, so that he can fix the timetable.

The new train, which will run year-round between Quebec City and La Ferme and on to La Malbaie (with a stop along the way at Le Massif for those who want to get straight to the slopes) is as innovative as his circus. Bi-level commuter cars from Chicago have had their upper galleries stripped out to create a cavernous space with enlarged windows, a Bose sound system and an iPad at every table of two or four seats. GPS activates the iPad to screen a short film or selection of stills of the place you’re passing, with sound over the speakers. The artistic quality of the contemporary and archive images is a joy, and a repeat or more information can be summoned on the touch screen.

The journey starts at a spacious station shared with the cablecar to the upper level of the Falls of Montmorency, offering a fine view of a wall of water higher than Niagara. James Wolfe – who led and was killed in the British capture of Quebec in 1759 – camped just east of the falls, and a Palladian house near them was tenanted by Queen Victoria’s father, Prince Edward Augustus. Flights of steps between belvederes have been built up the cliff to enable visitors to see the falls at different levels.

The Laurentian foothills from which the falls tumble continue all the way along the journey beside the St Lawrence. In the broad river lies Ile d’Orleans, a hilly island known as “the garden of Quebec” for the fruit and vegetables grown in its fertile soil. Once the suburbs of Quebec City have been left behind, the train scythes across those extraordinary letterbox-shaped fields that are so characteristic of the St Lawrence, introduced to New France (Quebec) in 1627 by Cardinal Richelieu to maximise the number of seigneurial farmers having access to water.

Even Richelieu would have been impressed by the neo-Romanesque Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, which dwarfs the train. The twin-towered stone church now serving this centuries-old pilgrimage site was completed in 1946. It is visited by 1.5 million people a year, and has a wall covered in the crutches of pilgrims who, having prayed there, apparently no longer need them.

Fields of sweetcorn give way to marsh and reeds as the distance between the railway and the St Lawrence dwindles to a few feet, a closeness broken only once for the rest of the journey. Few railways anywhere in the world give such prolonged views over a waterway. On the landward side the hills close in to create cliffs right beside the train, occasionally protruding to form a headland pierced by a tunnel. Splashes of orange lichen decorate the lower rocks, and tenacious trees cling to the cliff face.

From the three itineraries on offer, I had chosen “Discover Baie-Saint-Paul”, and eleven-and-a-half hour round-trip from Quebec to Baie-Saint-Paul which gave me three hours to see the largest town in the Charlevoix. The birthplace of Cirque du Soleil, Baie-Saint-Paul has streets lined with art galleries, craft shops and restaurants often topped by mansard roofs. The skyline is dominated by the mother house of the Little Franciscans of Mary and their Sacred Heart Chapel of 1904.

The nuns’ farm, La Ferme, was one of the largest in Quebec, but it burned down in 2008, and it is on this site that Gauthier has built the eponymous 145-room hotel to serve his Le Massif ski resort and become a destination in its own right. The first 77 rooms in two pavilions opened in June; the remaining three pavilions opened this month. Skiers wanting to base themselves in the hotel will, during winter, be able to get to the slopes of Le Massif courtesy of a German-built shuttle train that will make the 20km (12.5 miles) journey regularly.

The five buildings of the hotel are on the footprint of the farm buildings and all have a comparable standard of accommodation but different styles. There is no attempt at pastiche: the buildings are modern with lots of glass and wood and some exposed concrete with explosions of colour on doors or sections of wall.

Period photographs of bygone Charlevoix fill the wall above the beds, and some of the furniture has been made from local timber in a workshop for young offenders. The management is trying to weave the hotel into the fabric of local life by hosting a farmers’ market and setting aside a large hall for community and arts events as well as drawing on regional suppliers wherever possible.

It is here that the train turns briefly away from the seaway past a wrecked trawler to a new landscaped station beside the hotel. After I explored the town and visited a nearby emu farm and a cheese producer, we continued on to the terminus at La Malbaie, where a bus sent from the Fairmont Le Manoir Richelieu hotel meets the train.

This hotel provides the impressive food served on the train: dinner on the return was escargot terrine with oyster mushrooms, duck ballottine braised with almonds and apricots, and dark chocolate espresso tart with Bailey’s Irish cream truffle.

The tide had ebbed as we returned to Quebec City, and the low evening sun glinted off pools and braids of water on the tidal flats. A dozen or more ships passed by in the channel, which had been so accurately surveyed by James Cook in 1759 in preparation for the assault on Quebec that navigators were using his charts until the beginning of the 20th century. Perhaps in post-prandial contemplation, most eyes were on the sinking globe of pink as we ambled back to Quebec City.

Le Massif basics

Getting there

Air Canada (0871 220 1111; aircanada.com) has a daily service from Heathrow to Montreal: returns cost from £545 including taxes. There are more than 14 connecting flights to Quebec City (from £150) and four trains a day (viarail.ca; from C$83).